AVN.COM BUSINESS PROFILE 200604 - After One Year, Damaged in Excellent Repair

Just to be perfectly clear,Damaged Productions is not Damaged Pictures, even though their URL is damagedpictures.com. Capeesh?

"I personally think that Damaged Pictures is a better name, but that name was taken already for incorporation in the state of California," company Vice-President of Sales Lewis Adams told AVN. And just for the record, Adams noted, Damaged Pictures is a frame repair company — about as far removed from the wonderful world of jizzdom as one can get.

Any confusion notwithstanding, Damaged Productions is a new kid on the adult block, fresh off its nomination at this year's AVN Awards for Best New Production Company. "That was a huge thrill and a huge honor for us, Adams said. "It went to show that all the hard work that we put in did not go unnoticed, and we really appreciated it."

Damaged was founded in 2005 immediately after that year's AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas by DVD replicator Blaine Hensler and post-production whiz Steven Singerman. The two decided that, with their backgrounds in just about every area of adult production, teaming up and creating a company was, according to Adams, "a no-brainer."

Adams started out in the adult industry as Hustler Video's marketing director, and later pulled stints at his own small production company and the now-defunct Jill Kelly Productions. After hooking up with Damaged, Adams initiated a survival strategy via their sales policies immediately.

"I did not sell the integrity of the company; I kept a price," he explained. "We put a lot of money into our production and into our post-production and our artwork, and we foil our covers, so there is a little bit of money spent on the product. We were well funded enough that we didn't have to drop any price."

The company's first release was the all-anal wall-to-waller Anal Hazard, which streeted in February 2005. Of that title, Adams said with a smile, "Not the best cover, but a strong movie. Anal, I always say, is the sweet and sour chicken of porn. You can't go wrong; you'll always be able to sell an anal movie."

"We all realized you have to be specific," he noted. "You can't just make a boy/girl five scene generic movie or a five scene wall-to-wall lesbian movie. You have to give a little something to it, a little flavor, if you will. That was the lesson of our Asian stuff" such as the Asian Desires and Asian Thighs,Cream Pies lines.

"Asian does very well for us, so we spurned off a second Asian line," Adams continued. "Instead of doing a regular young girl/teen movie, how about a she-male movie? When you go generic on your product, you cheat yourself, really. You've got to do something to make your product stand out, and we just do things in a way that other people aren't doing at the present."

Such as distributing AVN Hall of Fame director John T. Bone's Latin efforts, including the intergenerational Tabu and Latin Motherfuckers. "When I saw Bone's footage," Adams said, "I said OK. He tends to push it a little far, which falls right in line with the philosophy of the company. It's nothing that's going to get anybody arrested, but yeah, this is something different that you're not going to see everywhere."

"I've told this story a thousand times," Adams said of how Damaged came to distribute that line. "This guy called me up, and anybody in the industry will tell you that you get these phone calls all the time. A guy shot this movie, and he's got these tapes, and he wants to sell them. Great. Fine. Come in Tuesday at 11, and he showed up on time. So I figured right then and there, let me at least look at this stuff. I've never seen any of these girls before and that holds interest for me, definitely."

Damaged recently upped its production quota and hired veteran director Jimmy D. to helm three productions a month.

"He's one of the best still photographers in this business, bar none, so the appearance of our boxcovers is going to improve vastly as a result, I believe," Adams said. "We really take a lot of feedback from our customers on the boxes, and I can't wait to see what they think of what Jimmy produces for us."

Also in the works is a new — again, distinctive — all-girl series.

"We're shooting our first girl/girl line, but it's going to be an older woman/younger girl scenario — more seductive," Adams said. "We don't want to go the disgusting route, where it's one girl just ripping another girl apart. It's going to be more like, 'Honey, we're home from dinner, I'll take the babysitter home' type of a deal. Instead of 30s and 40s MILFs doing guys, we figured we'd do a more seductive, coming onto the younger girl kind of a thing, maybe play up the lesbian housewife angle."

Other projects include Cytherea Falls, a spring title starring the former AVN Best New Starlet/Goddess of Gush, and its first interactive she-male title, Your Virtual She-Males, slated for a May release. Damaged is scouring Latin America for what Adams said is the "right grandma scene along with the mothers and daughters, the twins and the hermaphrodite" for the next installment of Tabu.

"There aren't that many of these type of movies out there, and we really felt that it was something that we needed to provide consumers," Adams said. One last time, that distinctive thing.